The GQ&A: Robin Williams

Somewhere along the line, we turned against Robin Williams. The Tourette's-like riffing, the schmaltzy roles, the clown nose—it was all too much. But did we miss something else? The raw talent and dirty mind that originally drew us to him? Is it time we forgave him for Patch Adams?

Sometimes, to see Robin Williams on TV, his wit and velocity of thought can seem like a kind of affliction. It dazzles, but it can also seem manic and pointless in its impressiveness; you wonder whether it might be twice the fun at half the speed. In person, in the quiet corner of a San Francisco hotel dining room, that is what you get. The riffing, as he calls it, is still there, but unobtrusively. (It's as though he can turn it down but can't quite turn it off.) Often—between coherently linked sentences in his own calm, deep, engaged voice—another comment will slip out, making some joke or pun or connection in a voice with a different pitch or accent or gender. Rarely do these demand a response or disrupt the conversation; they just ﬂoat as a pleasant, often entertaining, vestigial remnant of a different kind of encounter.

It was his multivoiced, hyperenergized self that ﬁrst made him famous—as the wide-eyed alien visitor Mork on the late-'70s TV series Mork & Mindy and as an untamed stand-up comic. But from the beginning, Williams, who studied acting at Juilliard with Christopher Reeve, tried to balance his comedic talents with darker, more earnest appetites. His ﬁrst truly successful ﬁlm, Good Morning, Vietnam, used his high-octane improvisational skills as he played a man who, in the end, had too much levity for serious times, but Williams was most impressive over the next decade when he was calmest: as an unconventional teacher in Dead Poets Society and as the sad-eyed therapist in Good Will Hunting, which earned him an Oscar. (He had previously been nominated for Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, and The Fisher King.)

In the '70s, he lived wildly, but by the time he settled in San Francisco with his second wife, Marsha, all that was behind him. These days, his work aside, the 54-year-old Williams is known as America's keenest celebrity follower of cycling and a frequent member of Lance Armstrong's Tour de France entourage. Two days before we meet, in fact, he and Armstrong went to see U2. ("I was dancing and singing as loud as anybody else," Williams says, and offers me a snatch of "Pride [in the Name of Love]" as corroboration. He notes that he feels an affinity with Bono for various reasons: "We kind of look like each other. I'm the older version of him.")

At some point in the '90s, the consensus seemed to turn against Williams; increasingly, his movies were seen as lazy and emotionally manipulative, and critics talked as though he were somehow peddling the blunted remnants of a talent that used to dare and soar and gleam. But since then, his career has veered in unexpected and often interesting directions. He returned to stand-up and made a considerable number of small, unusual movies, including those he has referred to as his triptych of evil—playing a creepy and mesmerizing photo clerk in One Hour Photo, a quietly delicate murderer in Insomnia, and an evil-minded children's entertainer in Death to Smoochy. (He's now sneaking back toward the mainstream in the Barry Sonnenfeld comedy RV.) Recently, he also popped up in The Aristocrats. "It made me kind of proud to be part of a group that's nasty," he says. "It's just nice to be in the pantheon. I don't know where I sit in the food chain, but it was just an interesting group to be part of—the offensive fraternity. It's like saying, 'Still there…still among ﬁlth.' "

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I like that pretty much the first thing you see driving in from the San Francisco airport is the sign notifying motorists that they're driving on your adopted stretch of highway.

Yeah. I think it's been about fifteen years. Bette Midler kind of got us into the idea—she did it in New York. A woman said the other day, "Your highway's not looking good." Sorry! I'll get out there, lady.

So how would you describe where your head is right now?

It's been pretty relaxing the last few years, because there's no pressure, doing these small movies…

Did you deliberately engineer this no-pressure situation, or is it just how
it evolved?

I think it evolved through circumstance.

Was there suddenly a moment when you weren't being offered
the big attractive movies?

Yeah, there was a moment when it quieted down. Literally, after Bicentennial Man—we can mention it—things were like [makes drooping noise, like something falling off a precipice]. It changed the parameters, but once the price and everything dropped, it opened up a whole world.

How much of the fuel for doing these very different roles was what you saw as the backlash against movies like Patch Adams?

It wasn't like, "I'll show you, you fucker!
You want dark? I'll give you dark."

But there seemed to suddenly be a point where people—

Oh yeah, they were pissing on it.

—were harping on about—

Soft, cuddly, warm, and kind, yeah.

Saccharine, I guess, was the nasty word.

Saccharine—that's a nice word, compared to some. There was a reaction to that movie, like an incredible tissue rejection. The weird thing is, publicly, all these people would say to me, "It changed my life." But critically, something snapped. And the vitriol was pretty shocking. What's to despise so much?